As a conservative Republican in Lafayette, Linda Ellman wouldn't even put a "Bush for President" sticker on her car for fear of what might happen.

But when the president won re-election Tuesday, she was surprised to find she wasn't alone.

"I go to a church where all four pastors are Democrats," Ellman said. "But when I called the church to find out the reaction to the election, I heard there had been a lot of high fives from closet Republicans."

The Bay Area is the Promised Land for California Democrats, a region where liberal congresswomen like San Francisco's Nancy Pelosi and Oakland's Barbara Lee collect better than 80 percent of the vote and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry would have been elected president by acclamation.

But the same divisions that have split the country into a sea of heavily rural Republican red states bordered with a few sections of more urban Democratic blue states have colored California's political map.

Democratic control of the state is in no immediate danger. Democrats hold solid majorities in the Legislature and a 33-to-20 edge in the state's congressional delegation. Kerry beat Bush by 10 percentage points, 54 percent to 44 percent, and Democrat Barbara Boxer, one of the nation's most liberal senators, won re-election with 58 percent of the vote.

A look inside the presidential vote, however, shows trouble brewing for the Democrats.

Republicans won 36 of the state's 58 counties and probably will add one more when absentee and provisional ballots are counted in Mono County, where Bush and Kerry are now tied. Kerry won Sacramento County, 50 percent to 49 percent, but nothing farther from the coast, except for tiny Alpine County and Imperial County, where the population is more than 70 percent Latino.

"What you see in California is what you see across the country," said Mike Spence, president of the conservative California Republican Assembly. "The urban areas are heavily minority and heavily rich, so they go for the Democrats. The rest of the state is more middle-class, more rural and more Republican."

According to Tuesday's exit polls, Kerry beat Bush 60 percent to 37 percent in the state's urban areas, which have nearly half of California's voters, but split the vote in the suburbs and lost in the rural countryside.

Katherine Lopez lives in Oakley, a small city in Contra Costa County. Her husband is in the Air Force, stationed at Travis Air Force Base. She's a Republican who noticed the difference when they moved to the more rural community.

"It doesn't feel very Democratic out here, like it did when I lived in Pittsburg and Antioch," she said. "It's more conservative, and there's a big Christian community out here."

The religious connection made a huge difference in the presidential election, in California as well as in the rest of the country. Exit polls in the state showed that voters who attended religious services weekly backed Bush, 52 percent to 46 percent, while those who never attended church voted 58 percent to 40 percent for Kerry.

"We tried to let people realize how important their beliefs are, since someone's beliefs will always prevail in an election," said Amy Koonz, a spokeswoman for the institute in Sacramento. "There are a lot of conservative and family-friendly voters who want to see their beliefs respected."

For some California voters, religious beliefs and moral values trumped concerns about the day-to-day events in the news.

"He's a churchgoing man who isn't afraid to say he didn't used to be, and that's more important to me than stuff like Iraq," Grant said. "I disagree with a lot of what's happening in Iraq, but that's not most important in my head."

Religion and values also are playing a role in the gradual slide of Latino voters to Republican and more conservative candidates, said Harry Pachon, director of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California. An estimated 32 percent of the state's Latino voters supported Bush this year, a 12 percentage point increase from 2000.

"Catholic and evangelical groups were pushing get-out-the-vote efforts, and there is very high church participation in the Latino community," Pachon said. "And Latinos are not a hip-pocket Democratic vote."

Demographics are playing a role. The Latinos who immigrated to the United States in the 1970s have children who have grown up as American citizens and have the same concerns as other Californians their age.

"People don't realize how upwardly mobile the Latino population is," Pachon said. "They move to the suburbs to buy homes and respond to the same currents as the general electorate."

Democratic strongholds such as the Bay Area and the city of Los Angeles are going to find themselves squeezed politically by the faster-growing suburbs and rural areas.

"The growth in the state is from Sacramento to Bakersfield and then in the Inland Empire counties of Riverside and San Bernardino," said Duf Sundheim, chairman of the California Republican Party. "In Merced, near where the new university is going in, they're building lots of 500-home developments, and we're going to be all over that area since those are our people moving in. "

In places such as Temecula in Riverside County, Hesperia in San Bernardino County and the Sacramento suburbs all the way to Placer County, there's explosive growth -- and the people who are moving there are very different from those who live in San Francisco, Berkeley and Palo Alto.

"These outer suburbs are more white and more family oriented" than the state's urban areas, said Baldassare, who has studied the changing makeup of California. "There are more married couples with children and more religious involvement."

The people in those communities, the red state of California, "made up a silent minority who mobilized and quietly went to the polls," he added.

It wasn't that long ago that California was considered a strong Republican state. The Democratic sweep at the top of the ticket traces to 1992, led by presidential candidate Bill Clinton and a pair of Senate victories by Boxer and Dianne Feinstein.

While people in the Bay Area still may be able to say they've never talked to anyone who voted for Bush, Tuesday's election results show they don't represent the bulk of the country and soon might not be able to swing state elections their way.

That's one reason Democrats are working aggressively to build a presence in cities like Stockton, Modesto, Fresno and Riverside, reaching out to what the party recognizes is a different type of Democrat and independent voter.

"We absolutely need to do more work and build up registration in the Central Valley and Inland Empire," said Art Torres, head of the state Democratic Party. "We can't and won't surrender those areas."

A closer look at how Californias vote was split

Geography was a determining factor in how California voted in Tuesdays presidential election. Most inland counties outside the Bay Area voted for President Bush, with his strongest support in the far northeastern corner of the state. But these were offset by votes for Democrat John Kerry in the more populous counties of the Bay Area, coastalNorthern California and Los Angeles. Mono Countys vote was evenly split, with each candidate receiving exactly 2,200 votes. .

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.